If you use Facebook, you’ve probably seen entries like this in your news feed.

They seem to just be popular posts from pages that your friends ‘like’. I find them to generally be irrelevant, so I made a user script to hide them.

It was an interesting opportunity to poke around the Facebook frontend JavaScript code. I also tried out MutationObservers and built my knowledge of XPath, which is very powerful.

Code is in the Hide_Facebook_Like_News.user.js Gist, which also explains how to use it:

passletters is a tiny command line utility to read a password from stdin and echo it with letters enumerated (for entry into web prompts that demand random, individual letters). The terminal scrollback is cleared afterwards.

sudo pip install passletters

NB: sudo may be needed to install the passletters script somewhere in your PATH.

https://github.com/inversion/passletters

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/passletters

Buzzword Ipsum is a businesslike lipsum generator that I have been developing for a bit of fun with a friend. The USP is that it attempts to form coherent sentences rather than just returning a bunch of random words tacked together. However, the content may preclude any efforts towards making the sentences make sense.

buzzword-ipsum on GitHub

Fezzle is a new site I’ve created which is based around playlists of the most popular songs for artists playing at festivals. It’s a way to discover who the other bands are at a festival you’re (potentially) going to. It is borne of frustration from looking at line-ups and searching by hand on YouTube or Spotify, and is essentially a quicker way to do that without a lot of copy and pasting or alt-tabbing.

Current development status:

• Tested on major desktop browsers as well as iOS simulators for iPhone and iPad
• Festival list is rather UK-centric.

Planned features – Lots! But firstly:

• Get more festivals included, especially those not in the UK.
• More information displayed about festivals and artists (country, bio, etc.)
• Some way to export or note what you liked – especially integration of favourites into the excellent Clashfinder.

Here is a script to generate different sizes and formats of favicon as well as apple touch icons for different tablets and phones. It uses the convert program which is part of ImageMagick.

As a starting point, create a square PNG with dimensions > 144px. I went with 512px. The script generates the different favicons for IOS, Android and desktop browsers as well as outputting the HTML to put in your header.

#!/bin/sh

convert favicon.png  -bordercolor white -border 0 \
          \( -clone 0 -resize 16x16 \) \
          \( -clone 0 -resize 24x24 \) \
          \( -clone 0 -resize 32x32 \) \
          \( -clone 0 -resize 48x48 \) \
          \( -clone 0 -resize 64x64 \) \
          -delete 0 -alpha off -colors 256 favicon.ico

HTML=""
for SIZE in 57 72 114 144
do
    for SUFFIX in "" "-precomposed"
    do
    FILENAME=apple-touch-icon-${SIZE}x${SIZE}${SUFFIX}.png
    convert -resize x$SIZE favicon.png $FILENAME
    if [ "$SIZE" -ne "57" ]
    then
        HTML=$HTML"<link href=\"${FILENAME}\" rel=\"apple-touch-icon${SUFFIX}\" sizes=\"${SIZE}x${SIZE}\" />\n"
    fi
    done
done

# Don't need the dimensions explicit for the 57x57 icon
mv apple-touch-icon-57x57.png apple-touch-icon.png
mv apple-touch-icon-57x57-precomposed.png apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png
HTML='

<link href="apple-touch-icon.png" rel="apple-touch-icon" />
\n

<link href="apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png" rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" />
\n'$HTML
echo $HTML

References:

How to Add a Favicon to your Site

Adding an Icon for iPhone, iPad & Android to Your Website

Don’t Forget About Favicons on Retina Screens

Apple: Custom Icon and Image Creation Guidelines

Microsoft: Customizing the Site Icon

ImageMagick Favicon Recipe